Hacker Musings and OCD

Everything is horrible

I started reading comics again, so naturally I wanted to do so on my iPad. Thankfully Comixology existed; I immediately began diving back in. Time passes, and Amazon scoops them up.

It’s a natural fit, and if there’s one thing Amazon does well it’s selling things. So I’m excited! Except, everything is horrible, and Amazon begins botching the acquisition immediately. They launch a new app, to disable IAP: can’t have 30% heading to AAPL! Despite having all my previous (iTunes Store) purchases showing in my account on the web site and the new app, I can now only read them in the old app; downloading some titles isn’t apparently allowed. There is no FAQ about this. Maybe one day it’ll return. Nonetheless, it is unpleasant as a user to see my once streamlined, rock-solid buying-and-reading experience turned into something awkward and clunky. I mean, it doesn’t even use Amazon’s payments! I have to keep a separate CC on file with them!

iTunes continues to disappoint at every turn. My library is essentially unusable. There is no “reset iCloud Match” command, or way to manually say “you somehow have your shit all fucked up for this one song”. So I have playlists and albums with dupes that are greyed out and constantly have the “attempting to download” squared-circle, ratings are useless (entire albums marked 5-star, that I don’t even listen to much), and more.

Watching shows I’ve purchased on iTunes via my Apple TV is an exercise in frustration. The most common scenario now is that in order to watch a show, you must take a circuitous route through the various menus in order to find it. Just going to it via the “home page” doesn’t work. It sometimes takes 10+ clicks to get the TV to admit there’s a show to watch.

This is, of course, when my super-fast Verizon FIOS connection isn’t being throttled to the point of uselessness. I’ve stopped watching YouTube, because there’s no point in even trying any more. The odds VZ will let the bytes down the pipe at a reasonable rate – enough to watch an animal be moderately cute for 45 seconds – are increasingly slim.

I could go on. Numerous apps I once relied on – 1Password chief among them – are utter shit. An app we use at work did a major rev with corresponding upgrade fees, to the tune of $150 per seat, and won’t be fixing any of the bugs we have outstanding in v4. “Upgrade to v5 and maybe we’ll fix them”, we are told.

There are people who think that Microsoft EOL’d XP because they are greedy. These people are very, very stupid. Microsoft gave everyone years of warning that it was going to happen; so shut up.

In the mean time, look at the very real software (and hardware!) situation going on around you. The entire thing is garbage. Real software we use today is horrible: user interfaces for line-of-business apps feature puzzle-solving as interaction. Software reliability is less than worthless. Everything takes more money than is reasonable to just get a shitty, bug-ridden blob of bytes out the door. “The Cloud” solved none of this; except to make even experienced professionals more unhappy.

Things are horrible and, like most of life, one imagines it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.